Guest Article: How to Craft a Great Welcome Email Sequence

Between Offset Commerce and our Brand Studio’s services, we cover a lot of ground for our clients, but that doesn’t mean we do everything. Nor should we. We believe strongly in expertise and love getting the chance to collaborate with clients’ teams and consultants to ensure their businesses run smoothly and their stories are told powerfully.

Our guest contributor Nat Gunter is one such consultant that we’re honored to have in our orb. Drawing from a deep background in wine and a natural brilliance with words, his marketing consultancy WORDSHOP seamlessly blends strategy and storytelling to ensure his clients build deeper, more impactful connections with their customers. In this article, he shares his approach to crafting a welcome email sequence for our shared client X NOVO, as well as best practices for creating your own email sequences.

– Julia Weinberg, Offset VP of Commerce Strategy

Craig Williams is a quiet lion of California wine. As winemaker at Joseph Phelps from the mid-1970s through 2008, he crafted many memorable vintages of their flagship Insignia and spearheaded the winery’s westward expansion on the Sonoma Coast with Freestone Vineyards.

Now as he nears 70 armed with a lifetime of knowledge, he has embarked on a new beginning with X NOVO, an estate vineyard and winery in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills.

While grapegrowing and winemaking fell firmly in Craig’s wheelhouse, communicating with and offering wine directly to consumers was something completely new. I worked with Craig and the team at Offset to create a sequence of emails that introduced X NOVO and reintroduced Craig Williams to his new mailing list members.

While grapegrowing and winemaking fell firmly in Craig’s wheelhouse, communicating with and offering wine directly to consumers was something completely new. I worked with Craig and the team at Offset to create a sequence of emails that introduced X NOVO and reintroduced Craig Williams to his new mailing list members.

When the winery’s name and the winery’s ‘WHY’ are the same, magical connections are made. X NOVO is derived from the Latin ex novo meaning ‘anew’ or ‘from the beginning’. The crux of the whole project was distilled to one simple question.

“What good are life’s lessons if we cannot begin again?”

From this powerful and universally human question we turned to Craig’s own words. Thoughtful and deeply personal, he penned 2,200 words-or-so about life, family, winemaking, grapegrowing, and Oregon.

Taking his words, cadence, and tone as my lead, I crafted three emails that highlighted the Person, the Place, and the Product, and culminated in a fourth email with the inaugural offer from X NOVO.

Along with Craig’s personal words came the insightful direction that X NOVO was to be a brand that celebrated enjoyment, thoughtfulness, reading, and personal communication.

Enriching Craig’s words were the wonderful images of Oregon photographer John Valls. Black & White photographs of Craig walking the vinerows with his trusty companion ‘Fredo’ (never underestimate the power of connection that pets make us feel), holding a cluster of almost-ripe Chardonnay, and textural images of the volcanic rock that makes the Eola-Amity Hills so special, provided a rich visual element to our storytelling.

This series of emails and the inaugural offer precede the creation of the X NOVO website. For most folks, this order seems illogical or suboptimal. For me, it was an incredible advantage. Rather than relying on a website to tell a story passively, we did so actively, through the intimacy of the inbox.

The answer of course isn’t either/or it’s both/and. So now work on the X NOVO website begins in earnest with the good folks at Offset.

Nat Gunter is a writer and strategist serving wineries in the direct-to-consumer channel through his agency WORDSHOP. Nat’s work is informed by restaurant, cellar, and sales experience and WORDSHOP’s services include copywriting, brand strategy, brand messaging, and email marketing.